


the fine art of falling apart

by deckards



Category: Heroes (TV), Heroes Reborn (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-25 11:10:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6192742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>los angeles, 2013.</b> advanced cybernetic implants are becoming increasingly common among humans, while the individuals from whom the technology is derived are forced to hide at the fringes of society. noah bennet, a part time investigator and full time disaster, is hired to look into the disappearance of quentin frady’s sister. but just like any cliched detective story, finding her turns out to be more trouble than he bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> super huge thanks to the fantastic [cogs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AClockworkLove) for her wonderful beta work and for putting up with me throughout this process.
> 
> if you're curious, more on this au can be found [here](http://noahbennets.tumblr.com/post/136078459836/deus-ex-machina-a-heroesreborn-au-the-first-was).

> we’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,  
>  painted on a pole
> 
> \---- william shakespeare

 

The thing that you need to know is this: some events can never be changed.

There are constants and there are variables and there are an infinite number of combinations: many universes, many outcomes—more even than can be fathomed by the human mind. But across all of them, joining together every timeline and alteration, there is a delicate intertwining of immutable events.

These things can _never_ be changed.

There is always a girl and the girl always jumps and the chaos always follows. This thing cannot be changed. The reasons why are incalculable. In each world, a different series of small cataclysms leads to this larger one. In each world, the response is another tragedy, another cycle. Everything always happens again, and nothing can ever truly be changed.

This is the way of the universe; some things simply _are_.

\----

He was waiting for me when I staggered into work, a short man with a ginger beard and dishevelled hair. Slightly too clean for this part of LA and jittery like he was coming down off uppers. He didn’t seem like my usual type; the smells were all wrong. He wasn’t reeking of despair or crisply attired in a flashy suit stinking of money. Still, somehow he’d found my office, shunted into the ground floor of a small, crumbling building, and that could only mean one thing: a distraction.

From the look of him it wouldn’t be a big account, not one of the high rolling lawyers who needed to discredit a witness or tamper with a jury, but not a charity case at least. Working in the slums attracted a certain type of clientele, and I liked to think that, among the wretched and the scum, I’d cultivated a reputation for being an efficient and discreet investigator. And, of course, running a more-or-less untraceable cash business.

The corridor we were standing in was dark, adorned with peeling wallpaper and the faded stains of various bodily fluids. It stank like cheap disinfectant.

I brushed passed the other man, leaned against my door and said, “Need something?”

An entirely redundant question: if he wasn’t desperate, he wouldn’t have come. No one ended up here willingly. It was the upside of working in this hellhole. That, the low rent, and Mildred—professional name Candi—the prostitute who worked the corner nearby and sometimes baked me cookies in return for glowering at her customers.

The man blinked at me. I raised an eyebrow. He frowned. I shrugged and slid my keycard through the lock. The door swung open with a muted wail. I supposed having it fixed wasn’t entirely out of the question. Maybe next week, or the week after.

To my back he said, “You’re Bennet?”

The way he spoke, it was clear he was expecting something far more impressive than a middle-aged man with glasses and a receding hairline. That seemed unreasonably optimistic for ten in the morning on a Thursday, though; I’d arrived at a decent enough hour and my suit, wrinkled and probably scented like stale alcohol, was at least unstained. That should be sufficient for anyone, especially someone in need of the services I offered.

I flipped a switch and the lights in my office flickered to life. They buzzed angrily, and every so often one of them would crackle.

I said, “Yeah,” and walked to my desk. It was the same desk I’d had when my ex-wife kicked me out of our house years ago, and it was still sturdy, though the varnish was worn and the corners were splintered.

I dropped into my chair and said, “So what is it you want?”

He took a few skittery steps into my office, eyeing the soiled, off-beige walls and the fraying carpet with a look of curious disdain. “I, uh, I heard you could help with....”

I raised my eyebrows at him.

On the other side of my desk were two sagging chairs. I gestured vaguely in their direction, pulled off my glasses, and started cleaning them on my shirt. He didn’t sit. Instead, he knotted his hands together and stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if he was looking for guidance or the source of the water damage.

I slid my glasses back on and tried to arrange my face into an unassuming smile. I said, “It’s okay,” because it sounded placating, and added, “take your time,” because now I was curious and I could do with a new diversion.

He looked at me and said, “My name is Quentin Frady.”

“Okay, Quentin,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He said, “It’s my sister. She’s gone missing and I need someone to help me find her.”

He said, “Look, I know about you. I mean, I know about who you are. Who you work for.”

I said, “I don’t work for anyone.”

“Who you used to work for, then. Primatech, the bagging and tagging, I know all of it.”

I kept a .38 taped to the underside of my desk. Paranoid, maybe, but opening a drawer or going for a holster broadcast too much information. I reached for the gun and said, “Who sent you?”

“No one sent me. Aren’t you listening? They have my sister and I need to find her!”

I rubbed at my forehead with my left hand and kept my right hovering near the revolver. “That doesn’t explain why you’re digging around in my personal business.”

He flopped into one of the chairs. “I know, I know. But I need—I mean—she....”

I ground my molars together and glared.

He reached into his coat pocket and fumbled for a data disk. He fiddled with it for a minute, watching the yellow piece of plastic pass through his fingers before he set it down on my desk and said, “Her name is Phoebe. All the information is there. I think she could have gotten mixed up with, you know, with all those drownings they’re reporting. I mean, they don’t say it in the papers, but they’re all connected to bots and she, ah, well she sometimes gets involved in things she shouldn't and, well, I mean you have experience with those types so...just...just look into it, okay? Please? I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

I continued to glare, hoping it would silently communicate my desire for him to stop talking and never start again. I was very seriously considering shooting him if his next words had anything more to do with my detailed knowledge of bots or my previous employment history.

He shifted, started to get up, and said, “I can pay.”

That was worth a brief reprise from violence. I moved my hand away from my gun and said, “I’m not cheap.”

It was a lie: if I liked the client, I’d work for almost nothing. I didn’t particularly need the cash. Primatech had cut me a more than reasonable severance and I didn’t have anything or anyone to bother wasting money on, so I lived in a shit apartment, worked in a shit office, ate shit food, and had a bank account full of credits accruing interest. When I died I was sure my children would be pleased to learn they were the sole beneficiaries—even if they both refused to speak to me. But this guy, Frady, I didn’t much care for his pitch, so he was getting the asshole premium. If he came up with something more interesting, I’d consider lowering it.

I said, “Ten thousand per day.”

“Sure,” he said and he reached across the desk to shake my hand. I let him.

I said, “Okay.”

He’d pay in cash, starting with an envelope he produced with fifty thousand credits inside and a promise that he could make good on whatever my final bill came out to, provided I could deliver. Anything to get this kid out of my office seemed like a square deal to me, so I accepted his terms and hurried him out.

Once he was gone I slid back into my chair and I closed my eyes and I opened a drawer and I grabbed a large bottle of scotch and a chipped coffee mug. The yellow data disk on my desk could wait for me to do a line. The yellow data disk on my desk could wait for me to down a drink or two.

Whatever Frady thought he’d discovered, it probably wouldn’t get me far. If he could uncover my past and still not know what happened to his sister, either he was looking in all the wrong places or the girl could simply not be found. That kind of thing happened, and more often than anyone cared to admit. Between the mood-stabilizing and memory wiping drugs, the life-enhancing synthetic augmentations and their accompanying rejection syndrome, and the general poverty of most of the citizenry, this town was a fucking mess; sometimes people out here just disappeared, willing or not.

At least the tip on the murders might pan out. It hardly took a genius to connect a series of drowning deaths occurring on dry land to a bot, but it was interesting to know he thought his sister could somehow be attached with anyone of that background. If nothing else, it was a place to start.

I poured the scotch and leaned back in my chair. It was inexpensive and tasted that way, but it left a trail of warmth down my throat and into my chest and I hummed tunelessly to myself as I let my eyes drift closed.


	2. Chapter 2

I liked it best at night, when the smog in the sky was lit up with dozens of colours, a motley reflection of the neon city lights. The flashing signs and garish windows made the whole place seem more livable; the streets were filled with artificial colours and artificial displays and artificial people, all of it covering up the grime and the refuse and the clutter that made daytime in Los Angeles look like a trip to a landfill with a permanently yellow glaze.

I’d never intended to be living here. I’d never intended to become a private detective, either, but that seemed like a natural enough transition once Primatech folded. There were only so many things you could do with the type of specialized skill set I’d acquired, and after all the years I’d spent following orders and taking shit, setting my own hours was a nice change of pace.

I lived twelve blocks from where I worked, close enough to be an easy walk but still far enough to be considered a marginally better part of town with marginally better places to eat. The sushi joint across the street from my apartment building was tiny and full of despair, and when I arrived I pushed my way to the bar, sat myself down, and barked my usual order at the owner. I came here enough that we could be friends, but neither of us wanted that kind of attachment, so all our conversations consisted of my requests for food spoken in Japanese and his acknowledgements spoken in English. Three years, and we’d never once exchanged names.

It had taken some digging, but eventually I’d found the serial number I’d been after buried in my old files: SV02, a leggy blonde who went by Tracy Strauss and was gifted with the ability to manipulate water. She was one of three identical Stage Two units and not surprisingly was unaccounted for. That generation of bot were either dead—retired, to use the technical term, mandated either because it wasn’t possible to kill something synthetic or because that sounded better than murder and kept the bots we hunted from becoming too human in our minds—hiding, or working for Renautus. I didn’t know it was her behind the drownings, not for sure, but it made a certain kind of sense. She had the ability, but other bots did, too. Even some of the regular augmented assholes running around probably could manage some black market enhancement to pull these murders off, as long as they could afford enough anti-rejection meds to stay sane. Or maybe the point was that they couldn’t.

Still, I liked Tracy for this more than some random augment junkie. The list of names being targeted was very specific, all individuals who had worked with bots, all with records of violence; individuals like me, employees former or current of companies trying to control the uncontrollable, to ensure that bots stayed suppressed and subhuman and abjected. That was a long list with only eight names knocked off and my own probably on it somewhere. And, more to the point, that was a list that had most assuredly caused Tracy a great deal of pain, making revenge the likeliest reason for the killings. It was simple, and I liked simple. So she was where I would start.

I had a few contacts in the underground who might be able to help me find her—hell, I had a goddamn _daughter_ in the underground—but that could expose them as well as Tracy and that was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. I had enough deaths on my conscious and most of them had been intentional; accidentally setting someone up, especially Claire, wasn’t worth it.

My sushi arrived, white styrofoam boxes wrapped in clear plastic, and I threw a handful of credits onto the counter before getting up to leave. The evening air, like the daytime air, was dense and too warm and full of smog. It clung to your skin like a silky sheen and sat heavily in your lungs, leaving the taste of disease in your mouth and a feeling like sickness crawling down your throat.

The streets were seething with people pressed together in slowly moving clumps. Above them, neon signs flashed advertisements for better futures and exotic locations and new augmentations, pithy slogans like, _The Future is Now!_ and _Evolve Today!_ written in blinding block letters.

I crossed to the alley between my building and the sushi place. It was dim and empty except for an unsettling feeling in my gut and a handful of wretches clinging to the walls: victims of bad trips, withdrawals, rejection syndrome, life. The problem no one wanted to talk about with all these shiny new upgrades to basic human anatomy wasn’t what it had taken to develop the technology or a flaw in the robotics or an inferior processor. The problem was that the cybernetics required a specific drug to repress the immune system and prevent the prosthetic limbs and memories and whatever the hell other crap from being rejected. But these drugs were expensive; Renautus held a monopoly on the formula and they paid a fortune to keep it protected by a small army of mercenaries. So people went without it and died; other people used knockoff versions and died faster or sometimes slower. Almost no one survived without the drugs, and the road from health to corpse was a long and tortuous one marked by decay and insanity and all kinds of violent mutilation. It was an ugly little tragedy, hidden down here in the slums where the rich and powerful corporate magnates didn’t have to be bothered with it.

Light was spilling in from the end of the alley, and my shoes clicked loudly on the pavement and sloshed dully through the puddles. I had more booze waiting for me at home to wash down my dinner and lull me to sleep.

That feeling, the one that had been twisting in my gut, I realized too late it wasn’t hunger but someone following me. I might not have noticed at all, but one particularly loud echo to my footstep made me turn my head. My face collided with a something rock solid and I dropped my food and I staggered backward against a brick wall.

I went for my gun and said, “Wha—?” but before I could reach my pistol or finish any sort of coherent exclamation I was pinned against the wall and the object—a frozen solid fist—had smashed into my ribs and forced the air from my lungs.

Blinking, I looked up into the shadowed face of Trace Strauss. She didn’t say anything, just turned her hand from ice to liquid and shoved it down my throat. I gurgled a series of desperate noises, vowel sounds mostly with a few guttural stops, and tried to pry her arm away. Before I’d made any real progress, she stepped back and I spluttered, forcing myself to breath in long, ragged gasps.

Tracy said, “I’m sorry. I need to talk to you.”

I gurgled a vague approximation of, “I have a phone.” Next to me, my takeout dinner had sprung free of its styrofoam cage and was bobbing in a muddy puddle.

She said, “I’ve been following you. I know you’re looking into those murders, but it wasn’t me.”

Having myself just a minute ago almost drowned while on reasonably dry land, that didn’t seem entirely convincing. I raised an eyebrow at her declaration.

She said, “I could have killed you. I didn’t. Someone is setting me up.”

I raised my other eyebrow. It wasn’t that I wanted her to be guilty, and if I was going to base my conclusions on solely physical attributes, I never would have considered her a suspect in the first place. But since long legs and a pretty face weren’t exonerating factors, I was having a tough time buying her line.

“This is serious, Bennet,” she said. “Believe me, after what you bastards did I would love nothing more than to see you all rot. Do you know what it does to a person, that kind of torture?”

I did, but I kept quiet.

“If I was doing this, you’d be on my list and you’d be a lot higher up than number nine,” she said, looking me over. “Number two, I think. Right after Danko. But it’s not me doing this, both of you are still alive, and there are people other than your drunk ass after me.”

She said, a note of real terror flitting into her voice, “I need _help_ , Noah.”

I said, “My sushi looks pretty soggy. I don’t think it’s edible anymore.”

She turned her hand back to ice and punched me in the gut. I crumpled into a pile next to my watery dinner and she strode away, her heels clack-clack-clacking a morse code pattern that spelled _asshole_ on the inside of my skull.


	3. Chapter 3

Sometimes I liked to delude myself that it was the job that had torn my family apart. Slouched on my couch with a bottle of scotch in one hand and an empty bowl of cereal in the other, it was easy enough to blame the way my life had turned out on Primatech and the constant secrecy it demanded. Easy to point to the lies and ignore the fact that I chose them, again and again and again. Because the thing about living a double-life was this: after a certain point, you got used to the panic. After a certain point, living in a constant state of fear became your normal, and that’s when lying started to become easier. Because anymore, you didn’t think in terms of deception, you thought in terms of survival. It stopped being about hiding the truth and instead it was about preserving the lie, preserving the image, preserving yourself.

People expected the truth to set you free. That after all that time, after all those years of lying and hiding and deceiving, the sudden honesty would be like a wave of relief, a flood of sudden happiness releasing you from your self-fashioned prison of deception. People were wrong. When the truth came out it was a violent, violative act that left you open and vastly, numbingly empty. When the truth came out it was like a plastic cup that’d been sucked dry, leaving only a few drops of moisture and some flavorless ice. Those dregs, those were all that was left of you; you were in pieces, snippets of the person you used to be pasted over this new, unrecognizable self.

You found yourself hollowed out, felt like there was nothing inside you but a wound and for a long time, all that would fill it, all that you could feel, was an indescribable, inexplicable rage. That rage, it had no direction or meaning. It couldn’t be channeled or used or understood. It simply was. And so instead of a world of panic and walls and cool deflections, yours became a world of terrifying exposure and insurmountable anger that bubbled just below the surface of your skin, simmering and threatening to explode in a fury of uncontained trauma.

The thing about living a double-life was this: you lost yourself in increments, slowly disappearing into the gaps between who you were and who you pretended to be, and when you tried to put the pieces back together you slowly came to realize that they simply did not fit anymore.

That was the state you found yourself in, and all the while the people around you, your wife who feared you, your daughter who hated you, your son who felt betrayed by you, they thought knowing your secret meant a fresh beginning and they looked to you to smile. They expect you to be happy, that they’d be greeted as saviors, praised and canonized for their work of rehabilitating you.

So you smiled, and you pretended, and you lied again. A different lie this time. A sunnier, happier version of the truth. A better you than you.

But in the end, it all fell apart anyway.

So it was easy to blame that all on the job, but really, there was no escaping that I had jumped at the chance to do it, believed so fully in the rhetoric of the Company that murder seemed somehow like the right choice, not just a desperate gasp at vengeance for what had happened to my first wife. Kate was one of the only secrets I had left, hidden even from Sandra, even after I’d blurted out everything else to try to justify myself, my actions, our marriage.

I don’t know why I thought confessing would be enough to balance out the scales on all the shit I’d done. Or maybe I’d hope to find a catharsis for myself. It didn’t really matter; Sandra had left and I couldn’t fault her no matter how much I wanted to or how far into a bottle I crawled trying to convince someone, anyone, that what I’d done had been if nothing else then for the right reasons. Maybe I’d believed that once, but now it was all so much fucking bullshit.

I staggered to my feet and dropped the scotch and the bowl on the coffee table and made my way to my bedroom. This case was already proving to be more trouble than it was worth. Normally I’d be happy to ignore it until either it solved itself or Frady asked for his credits back, but with Tracy’s unexpected appearance and not at all vague death threat added to the anticipated uselessness of Frady’s information, I was going to have to try something proactive after all. There was an old, abandoned facility on the edge of town that was owned by Renautus. I didn’t have high hopes, but I needed information and the people involved in abruptly ended experiments sometimes left behind more than they planned to.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than any other ideas and safer than reaching out to a contact, so in the morning I’d see where it lead, if anywhere at all.

\----

This crumbling cement eyesore, formerly a Pinehurst facility, formerly a Renautus facility, now a piece of forgotten real estate, seemed less and less likely to hold anything useful the more I stared at it. From the outside, Building 26 appeared as average as any other derelict warehouse complex. Its windows were smashed and covered with thick sheets of plastic and rusting metal beams and its roof was half-collapsed, rotted from years of hostile weather and neglect. The whole area was a mess of squat, colourless structures eroding into the grey pavement they’d been erected on; a concrete wasteland of geometric shapes and garbage and vast, bleak emptiness.

I stood in the shadow of the building, alone, looking up at the hazy sky. It was unsettling, being somewhere so vacant in a city so overpopulated. I kept suspecting someone was watching just over my shoulder or waiting to jump out at me from behind a shadowed corner, but there was no one for miles, especially during daylight.

I’d known about this place for a long time. I’d hoped I’d never end up here in person, though. It made me think too much about Claire and the concrete prison cells on Level 5, a polite Primatech euphemism for hole you’d never be allowed to crawl out of, unless it was in a bodybag. A night of lying passed out in my bed and a morning with a raging hangover and not enough cereal left to eat a proper meal had made this expedition seem even more pointless. Still, I was here; I might as well get on with it.

I had my pistol tucked into a shoulder holster and a spare clip in the pocket of my blazer. It hadn’t been much use against Tracy, but I wasn’t expecting her to turn up again, and if she did, I’d be faster. There was clearly more going on here than what Frady had led me to believe, and until I had figured out what, caution wasn’t a poor choice.

I tugged my shirt cuffs loose of my jacket and walked through the gaping hole that had once been a front door. On the inside, the place was even worse. It was dark and painted in chipped, age-stained beige. Faint yellow light poured in from the cracks in the windows, illuminating moats of dirt in the air and piles of filth on the floor, a monochrome mosaic of shattered tile and mouldy grout. I made my way down the entrance hall, looking for something that would let me access the other levels.

A few meters and several broken furnishings later I found the staircase I was hoping for. The sign next to it advised that the “wards” were down: administration was two floors up. There was a loud groan above me and a series of sharp staccato pops, then nothing. I paused. The building was quiet. I tried to open the door to the stairs, but it was blocked. Typical. I pounded on it with my shoulder until it opened and the banging noises were echoing around me like cannon blasts. The door creaked. Beyond it was darkness. Behind me, something screeched and scraped, but whatever it was, I couldn’t see it. I took out my gun and waited.

After a minute of thick silence, I decided it was probably the rusting walls or some small creature, so I put my gun back and pulled out my phone and turned on the light. The door closed behind me and the space was black with pinpricks of pale, blueish light: the kind of unnatural illumination that only technology could offer. I wasn’t excited about the dark descent in front of me, was altogether wary of what I might find left abandoned and rotting in a place like this, but patient areas had a geography that administrative offices didn’t. Even if there were no records left to be scavenged, there was a decent chance I could piece together at least some of what had happened here based on the type of landscape I found at the bottom of the stairs.

I licked my lips and started walking.


	4. Chapter 4

The stairs were cramped and the air was warm and dense and filled with years of dust. My eyes were watering and my nose was itching by the time I emerged into a long, deserted corridor. The light from my phone didn’t travel far, but it was enough to make out a low ceiling and a line of windowless metal doors marching off into impenetrable darkness. A shadow passed in front of the beam and I felt a shiver like a cold hand pressed against my spine. I couldn’t say what, but something about this place felt wrong. The noises I’d heard earlier returned, louder and more distant, sinister reverberations shimmying down piping, then just as abruptly they stopped.

The first few doors I passed were locked. The fifth was hanging open, crumpled from impact. The room beyond was tiny. The walls and floor were sprayed with dried, flaking brown and there were broken chains scattered across the ground. It smelled sickly sweet, the scent of rotting vomit; it was a particular odour, and one that was hard to forget. The last time I’d smelled it was years ago, in a facility just like this run by Primatech. The stains on the walls, they were in the pattern of blood splatter.

The room was a cage. I left it feeling dirtier than usual.

With only the tiny light of my phone to make sense of the shapes in the gloom, I started seeing hulking figures looming in the middle-distance and catching glimpses of jerky movements just out of my periphery. Beads of sweat ran down my face, collected at the small of my back, made my clothes stick to my skin. The feeling I’d had in the alley of being watched was tugging at the base of my skull. I shut my eyes then opened them and kept walking. One thing I’d learned from years of hunting bots was how to shut out the voice in my mind that sometimes shouted run when what I needed to do was focus.

My footsteps clacked loudly, overlaid on top of the occasional screeching noises from some other area of the building. The rooms here were all the same: prison cells smeared with shit and blood and whatever the fuck else.

Finally, at the end of the hall, I found a door to a bigger space. It was built like an arena, tiers of stairs circling a flattened bottom: a lecture hall, maybe. Squinting against the dark, I thought I could see desks of some kind near a gurney. I huffed. Of course this place wouldn’t have something so benign as a lecture hall; it was an operating room. I made my way down the shallow steps, peering around the space and imagining it filled with cold, clinical light and the smell of antiseptic and people in pristine scrubs all gathered around... _ this _ . A metal slab covered in scratches and stains. There were restraints attached, frayed and shredded.

The door slammed closed. I looked up. There was nothing there.

I picked up a piece of the damaged restraints. It looked like it had been torn apart with teeth and claws. I’d seen a lot of weird shit at Primatech, but this was something else. Something worse. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Building 26 hadn’t been abandoned by choice, and probably should have been torn down to its foundation and burned.

But it hadn’t and that was a lucky break for me. I moved over to one of the desks and started shuffling through the papers. There were scraps with scrawled words I couldn’t make out and smudged notations crammed into the margins. I gathered everything up I could and walked to the next desk. In one of the drawers was a bundle of files, the first thing that seemed like it might actually be useful. My mouth tugged into a lopsided grin.

There was a loud smashing sound near where I thought the door was, and a scrabbling like something crawling down the stairs. I stepped backward and crashed into one of the desks. Whatever papers had been on it softly hissed as they cascaded onto the floor. I griped the files I’d found tight and aimed my phone at the noise, but again, there was nothing.

“Jesus, Noah. Calm the fu—”

Something slammed into me, I slammed into the desk, and my phone rattled across the floor, leaving me clutching a stack of potentially useless information to my chest in a dark room. Perfect. I dropped the files and went for my gun. Knives or claws or teeth dug into my calf and I snarled and aimed at the empty space near my leg and pulled the trigger. The thing screeched and flailed backwards. Whatever it was, its skin was so pale I could just make it out, a sharp, angular jumble of limbs and claws like meat hooks, pallid grey on a field of black. It jerked and shook and lunged backward.

I grabbed the files and jogged in a crouch to my phone. It had skidded to the bottom of the stairs, and was pointing straight up, illuminating another pale, gangly shape. I shot at it and hit it and snatched up my phone and started running. Carrying all that crap made sprinting awkward as hell, but I only had one spare clip and no desire to make a return trip for any lost information, so I stuffed my phone into my pocket when I paused to open the door and hoped that between entering and leaving the operating room no new obstacles had found their way to the corridor.

I ran as fast as I knew how, my lungs burning from the stale air and sudden burst of exertion. Down the long, low hallway and back up the stairs to the main floor, shrieks and gargles and clattering, chattering, scraping following me all the way.

I flung the door open and threw myself into the dim light, blinding after the darkness, and kept running and didn’t stop until I was five blocks from the building, bleeding and heaving for breath. I had the files, and my life, and I wasn’t being chased anymore. Maybe whatever it was didn’t like the light; that would explain its almost glowing pallor, but not whatever had sliced into my leg or the long, thin limbs or the way they moved, almost like a person but ever so slightly wrong. I couldn’t decide what I thought they were, but I had a feeling they weren’t entirely human or entirely bot and I guessed maybe the files would have some information.

It took a few minutes to catch my breath and another few minutes after that to realize how much my calf hurt and my back ached. I sighed heavily. I’d run four blocks past my piece of shit car.

\----

It was two hours of driving through the usual city gridlock and by the time I made it home all I wanted to do was collapse on the couch and never get up again. The way my life was going, I should have expected things wouldn’t work out that way.

The keypad for my door was lying shattered in a bed of glittering frost and the door was ajar. I placed the files I was carrying next to the keypad and pulled out my pistol. I’d fired twice in the basement of Building 26, which meant I should have ten rounds left and a spare magazine, enough to stop Tracy almost killing me again.

I slid the door open with my foot. Tracy was sitting on my couch with a now empty bottle of scotch in her hand. I raised my eyebrows at her and in response she said, “I thought it would be rude to go digging through your cupboards looking for more.”

“But breaking and entering seemed perfectly reasonable?”

“I didn’t know the combination to get in here. And that thing had a fingerprint lock on the keys.”

“Yes, it did.”

She shrugged an apology and said, “Are you going to put the gun down?”

I said, “Are you going to try to drown me?” but it lost most of its effect; I’d already started to lower my pistol and walk back to the hallway to pick up the files. They smelled awful and were splattered with fresh blood. My fresh blood, I was pretty sure.

Behind me, Tracy said, “What the hell’s that?”

I kicked the door closed. It bounced off the frame. I frowned and pressed it shut. I said, “Work.”

She made a noncommittal noise and said, “Do you believe me now? That I’m innocent?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said, dropping the files on my kitchen counter and turning to look at her. She was wearing a black dress and the way she stood, I thought she must know exactly how good it looked on her. Still, there was something not quite right about her, a pale tiredness almost completely hidden but tugging slightly at her face, right around her eyes. I said, “Are you okay?”

She rolled her eyes in a particularly melodramatic fashion, which was probably all the response such an asinine question really deserved.

I raised my hands in defeat and tried to brush past her so I could get to my couch. I said, “I need to sit down.” She continued to not move out of my way.

I said, “Tracy,” trying to make sure my voice sounded as pathetically pleading as possible, because that was how I felt and I couldn’t be bothered with break-ins or twenty questions or anything else but then her hand was on my face, ice cold, pressed to the bruise she’d left last night.

I flinched and she said, “Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said, then changed my mind. “Yes, it hurts. You punched me in face when your fist was frozen solid.”

She said, “Sorry.”

I closed my eyes and mumbled a few consonants, not entirely sure what word they were meant to form, and leaned into her touch, wondering why it hadn’t occurred to me to ice some of the bruises myself. Probably because I’d been too drunk. That was usually the reason.

I wasn’t paying enough attention to know how long I stood there in some kind of useless stupor, but it had to have been a few minutes at least. There was a part of my mind convinced this was a poor idea and another part that desperately wanted something to drink but mostly there was just a dull flat nothingness. Which changed abruptly when Tracy slid her hand to the back of my head and tugged my hair and pushed her lips onto mine. It took a few seconds for me to realize that it was a kiss and not another attempted murder. And since this was a vast improvement over what felt like being waterboarded in an alley—and also because I’d always wanted to know what Tracy looked like without her clothes on—I decided I should probably do something other than stand still making a face like a sad, startled guppy.

I placed my hands on her cheeks. They were soft and her hair falling over my knuckles felt like strands of airy silk. For several minutes we played an infuriating game where I tried to maneuver my tongue so I could lick the inside of her lips and she turned away and nipped at my ears and dragged her teeth across my jaw, which was really just as good, even if it did make me suddenly extremely aware of the fact that I hadn’t shaved in days and my face must have felt like a field of coarse sand; the way Tracy started rubbing her cheek against mine anyway made me think maybe she didn’t mind.

When she pulled away, her skin was raw and red and I reached out to stroke it, but she ducked her head. I blinked a few times. I had no idea how this had happened; I’d never known Tracy particularly well and it wasn’t as if last night had been a rousingly successful interaction. I wanted to ask about it, but she started unbuttoning my shirt and I decided probably it was a better idea to shut up for once. I tried to grab at the zipper on the back of her dress. She leaned away and smacked at my hands and instead I returned to her hair and she returned to my buttons. 

With my shirt undone and untucked and Tracy still irritatingly well-clothed, she pressed her mouth to my neck. Her breath was warm and her tongue tickled my skin as it glided across my collarbone, and then she bit down, hard, on my shoulder, and I made a noise in the back of my throat that got lost somewhere between a scream and a goan and came out an awkwardly high pitched yap. 

She smiled dangerously up at me. My hands were still on either side of her face, the only place they were apparently allowed to be, and there was a trickle of blood on her lips, liquid red on smeared. 

I said, “Ow.”

The smirk on her lips, it curled up at the edges to reveal her teeth the way a leopard’s might right before it tore the throat out of its next meal.

I wanted to ask what the fuck that was for or check to see how much it was bleeding because I was vaguely concerned it was going to leave a scar and I didn’t need another one, but I got distracted by her hands moving under my shirt and up my back. She raked her nails down my shoulder blades and I arched into her rough touch and the long lines of scratches on my skin burned. She bit my chin. I picked her up and stumbled forward until we hit something solid—the wall, I assumed—and with Tracy pinned between me and it I wondered if maybe bots tasted different than humans and then decided that that would be worth finding out.

Tracy wrapped her legs around my waist and I growled into the crook of her neck and ran my hands up her thighs and under the sheer fabric of her dress. Her skin was warm, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but was. I felt her hips grind into mine and my pants were getting uncomfortably tight and her hands were unclasping my belt, and I thought, Jesus it’s been a long time since I’ve fucked someone against a wall.

“Is that what you think is gonna happen here?”

I looked up from her neck and said, “Huh?”

I was having a tough time seeing, the lenses of my glasses were coated in so much sweat and skin grease and makeup. They must have looked absurd. Tracy squirmed against me and pulled them off and said, “You were planning to fuck me against this wall?”

I might have dropped her when the stunning realization that I’d been speaking out loud finally hit, but before I had the chance she’d pushed me with alarming force and I fell backward onto the hardwood floor with her on top of me. She laughed and somehow pulled her dress over her head in one fluid, graceful movement. Straddling me, in only a black bra and matching panties, Tracy looked breathtaking. I had one hand on her hip and the other pressed against the taut muscles of her stomach and I guess a look of blank awe plastered across my face, because she leaned over me until my head was draped in her hair and all I could smell was lemon shampoo and she said, “You’re not gonna have a heart attack or anything there, are you?”

I grunted something resembling a disaffected no and griped her waist and flipped her over so she was on the ground and I was on top. I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t going to change her mind and try to kill me again, but the lack of dress and sultry smile seemed like a good sign, so I tugged her underwear off and left a trail of sloppy kisses and gentle bites up the inside of her thigh. 

It was odd, sliding a finger inside her and finding she felt just as warm and wet as any human woman. Tracy pretty clearly noticed my hesitation: she made a noise that sounded a lot like a warning and reached up to grab my head and drag it down toward her cunt. She tasted like salt and something I couldn’t quite place and she tugged my hair painfully to ensure I knew exactly what rhythm, what pressure, she wanted.

I could barely hear anything over the sound of my own harsh breaths and my tongue lapping against her slick skin. Her thighs pressed to the sides of my face contracted and spasmed and Tracy tugged at my hair again, this time dragging my head up to look at her. Her face was flush and coated in a sheen of sweat, her breasts heaving up and down. She panted, “I said, this is hurting my back.”

She licked her lips and breathed, “Don’t you have a bed?”

I said, “Yeah.” 

And she said, “Good.” 

And I picked her up and carried her into my bedroom like a groom carries a bride only we were neither of those things and there wasn’t a lot of romance when you were setting someone down on an unmade bed that probably should have been washed more recently than mine had. I could smell my own stale odour and sour alcohol on the sheets. I wanted to apologize for the generally appalling state of, well,  _ everything _ , but I wasn’t sure what to say. Sorry I can’t manage to clean a single room in this apartment? My ex-wife was better at this stuff? I swear I do shower and brush my teeth? Tracy meanwhile finished unclasping my belt and pulled off my pants and boxers in the same smooth way she’d removed her dress and then she took my cock in her mouth so instead of an apology I grumbled something incomprehensible and let my head fall back onto my shoulders.

Her tongue was writing poetry on my dick: long, warm, wet stanzas with jagged caesuras. I threaded my fingers through her hair and weaved surrealist patterns. She pulled away and I moaned and she took off my socks and pushed me into the pillows. I tugged off my shirt and blazer and watched her undo her bra and fling it over the side of the bed. She really did have fantastic breasts.

Tracy said, “You have handcuffs, right?”

My laugh was a few short, sharp rasps. I opened a bedside table drawer. There was a pair I kept there next to a loaded gun and a bottle of painkillers. I threw them to Tracy. She caught them and smiled and crawled over me and while I was watching beads of sweat trickle between her breasts she grabbed my wrists and pulled them over my head and cuffed them to the headboard and I said, “Huh?”

I said, “That’s a little tight.”

She said, “Mm.”

I said, “I meant the handcuffs.”

“I know what you meant.”

“Seriously, Tracy, it’s cutting off my circulation.”

“You don’t need blood there just now. Relax,” she said, and it sounded like a threat.

She griped my shoulders and lowered herself over me and Jesus it felt good. From that position it seemed a bit petty to keep complaining about my wrists, even if I was desperate to run my hands down her back and over her thighs. Her legs were so long, and smooth, and squeezing against my ribs and her ankles were pressing into my ass. She rocked back and forth with increasing intensity, my spine banginging against the headboard in time with my muted grunts. One hand dug into my shoulder, creating little fingernail shaped craters, and the other scratched and scraped up and down my torso, occasionally stopping to tear at the thatch of hair on my chest.

I suppressed the urge to whine and with it the desire to beg and instead I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to hold on as long as I could, which turned out wasn’t really as long as I might have liked. The muscles in my body were so tense they ached and then they were liquid and as much as I wanted to be able to feel my hands again, I couldn’t catch my breath or figure out which words would accomplish that. Instead I stayed still, feeling like an unimpressive and badly bruised noodle while I waited for Tracy to dismount and unlock the handcuffs. 

When she finally did the blood rushing back into my hands hurt like hell but she kept hold of my right arm and cuffed it back to the headboard, looser this time. I sent her the most pointed look I knew how. She shrugged and gathered up her bra and left the room and I had to admit it was a lovely view. When she came back she was fully dressed. She threw a crumpled up paper towel at me that was soaked in come. 

“Thanks?”

She smiled and said, “You looked like you could use it.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant the paper towel or the sex or maybe both. Probably both.

She said, “I don’t want you following me out of here, Noah. Just do your job and find out who’s trying to set me up.” Then Tracy turned and walked away and I heard my front door click closed. 

The key to the cuffs wasn’t far away, I could reach it if I really wanted to, but I didn’t. My hair hurt and my back hurt and the parade of cuts and purpling bruises across my body hurt but everything still felt somehow pleasing and all I wanted to do was go to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

I woke up naked and erect, one hand still handcuffed to my headboard and the rest of my body aching and covered in dried, flaking come.

I said, “Christ,” and reached for my glasses. 

They weren’t there. Of course they weren’t. Tracy must have taken them off me sometime last night; I couldn’t remember when that had been or in which room, but I hoped when I found them my dignity would be nearby. It had been missing for a while, and I was becoming increasingly desperate to get it back.

I scrabbled around for the key, left in a tangle of sheets near my waist, and uncuffed myself. Both my wrists were raw, open wounds of chaffed flesh where the metal had cut into my skin and scraped hard red lines and dark bruises into it. My calf burned when I stood; the cuts across it were deep and had bled all over the bed. I already regretted having woken up this morning.

It took an inordinate amount of time for me to get myself cleaned, dressed, and into my kitchen to turn on the coffee maker. Every part of my body was pulsing with pain and the only difference was if it was dull or sharp and I couldn’t help moving in slow motion. The files I’d recovered were on the kitchen counter and my glasses were still coated in filth on the floor and my dignity, unsurprisingly, was nowhere to be seen. I’d look for it in a mug of coffee.

Three cups later, two of them with a generous measure of rye, I was sitting on my couch half buried in a paper mountain of old lab reports and psychological evaluations. Building 26 hadn’t just been trying to recreate the original Stage Two bots, they’d been experimenting on them, trying to find a way to take their stable cybernetics and graft them onto human hosts. From the gruesome pictures, they’d been pretty heinously unsuccessful. There were no specifics on whether the cages there had been for people or bots or most likely both, but they did detail in an appallingly clinical way the effects of the experiments. From I what I read, it looked like the things I’d encountered had been people once. Now they were some genetic mutant monsters, the end result of rejection syndrome run rampant and amped up by some provisional cure that had turned things from bad to much, much worse.

I thought about Claire, and what Renautus would do to her if they caught her. The same type of thing, most likely, only her healing would keep her alive and cogent for all of it. They’d drain her blood again and again to make more of their miracle drugs and she’d be left there, alone, in the dark. 

I put down the file I’d been looking at and went for the bottle of rye, because who was I trying to kid hiding it in coffee. Claire was fine, she was safe and secret and away from all of that, and imaging what-ifs never helped anyone. Still, if not Claire it could easily be Tracy. She might not have Claire’s power, but I had little doubt Erica Kravid would find some depraved way to torture the secrets of Tracy’s freezing ability out of her or else turn her into a hunter, a partner to someone like me. She’d be another Claude or Rene and end up dead or in hiding or something worse, something like Harris.

There was an odd dislocation I could sometimes feel in my mind, between who I was now and who I’d been then. The things that used to matter didn’t, the beliefs I’d clung to like rocks in a river filled with rapids were meaningless now or else they were utterly and contemptibly wrong. The city was tearing itself apart fighting for pure humans or enhanced ones, was still kept mostly clueless about the origins of their divisive technology, and no one seemed to be able to fathom that they were all just  _ people _ . All just a damn mess of violence and fear and hope or whatever it was that separated humans from dirt, which wasn’t much in my experience. 

It was a lesson I’d learned mostly in hindsight, the kind of hindsight that painted your memories like nightmares from someone else’s life. They were incidents you remembered with shattering clarity but were desperate to forget, attached to emotions that made your internal organs feel like they were being cooked in a boiling pot of liquified fat and shame. Mostly I tried not to think about it; I spent too much time wallowing in my self-indulgent misery and apathy as it was. Pathetic, really, walking around all day knowing you could afford to eat and live and drink yourself into unconsciousness but still finding time to regret choices you’d made so long ago you couldn’t even remember their context. It made me want to sleep and not be bothered with ever getting up.

It didn’t concern me that I wouldn't be missed if I just dissapeared from the face of the earth one day, but I stayed awake worrying about Claire. About what would happen if they did find her. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself she was safe and, as she had made abundantly clear, did not need me to protect her, it was an obsessive fear I just couldn’t give up. It was a dependency worse than alcohol or any of the drugs I’d ever done. Most mornings it was why I woke up. The way that fear hung over me, it made me understand why addicts were never cured.

Trying not to think about Claire made me think about Tracy instead and remembering how her legs felt wrapped around me wasn’t any more helpful than my paranoid tendencies. I could track her down if I wanted to—I had enough contacts and favours owed I could find just about anyone—but a large part of me would have prefered she look me up instead. That didn’t seem too likely, but maybe if I could solve this case and prove her innocent—

Oh, that was not good. My job wasn’t to prove her innocent, it was to find Frady’s sister. Hell, I didn’t even know if Tracy  _ was _ innocent.

I slid my glasses down my face with the heels of my hands and buried them in my eyes until explosions of lights were dancing on the underside of my lids. I was so monumentally stupid sometimes.

When I had been working for Primatech, back when I bought into all their inculcating bullshit, I had a rule about not messing around with bots. It was an admittedly useless rule, seeing as I was married and unconditionally faithful and generally labouring under the delusion that bots were subhuman things, but anyway it was a rule and I should have stuck to it. If nothing else I wouldn’t have ended up in this idiotic predicament. 

I said, “Fuck me,” which I was fully aware was the precise problem but I found something intangibly pleasing about the irony. I gulped down most of the rest of the bottle of rye.

That rule had been because of Claude, mostly. I didn’t need the rule to keep my distance; I’d been a good little soldier and, in the respect that I’d never cheated on Sandra, I’d been a good little husband, too, though realistically I’d been a horrifically awful husband and that Sandra stayed with me as long as she had still sometimes baffled me. But I was interested enough in the gruff Brit that I’d felt I needed a rule, some kind of absolutely definitive mandate, that would prevent me from ever suggesting I might harbour feelings that were anything more than what our relationship was instructed it should be: business partners and casual friends. 

I still thought about it sometimes, the way his face had looked when I’d shot him. The way it was laced with confusion and terror and absolute betrayal. Those thoughts were always unbidden and I tried to bury them as fast I could.

There were things I had done that I was not proud of and there were things that I’d done which most would consider monstrous. And then there was that.

So I had a rule and it was a good rule and I followed it and no one ever knew how I actually felt and that was fine. It was fine because it couldn’t have gone anywhere even if Claude had known; I wouldn’t have let it and he was, as far as I knew, completely straight. 

And if I’d still been following that rule, or if I hadn’t been too cheap and lazy to hire a prostitute or troll through a bar hunting for loneliness and despair, I might not have fucked Tracy and if I hadn’t done that I probably wouldn’t be sitting here trying to remind myself she was still a murder suspect, I was still an asshole, and there was nothing good that could come from me entertaining thoughts about last night. Which was all well and good, but that was demonstrably not how things had occurred and I couldn’t decide if I was more annoyed that I’d let Tracy screw me into forgetting she wasn’t necessarily telling me the truth or that I wanted this to be at the very least a multi-night stand and possibly something involving a breakfast or two.

I drained the remnants of the rye and started shuffling the files around hoping for inspiration or a reasonable distraction. It was grim, grisly reading. Toward the bottom of a pile of forms with the pictures and names of anyone unfortunate enough to get mixed up with Renautus I found something to make yesterday's ill-conceived break-in seem worthwhile.

I read over the paper in my hand again and again.

It was a picture of a young girl with long brown hair and a kind of childlike vivacity, all pure innocence and exuberance. She had been entered into a program which claimed it could help people who had enhancements but no means to afford the meds which kept rejection at bay; in truth she had been sucked into Renautus’ experiments, almost certainly without her consent. I thought of the grotesque figures in Building 26 and their pallid skin and their spastic movements. 

The name at the top of the sheet was Phoebe Frady. Quentin’s missing sister.


	6. Chapter 6

The voice on the other end of the connection was squeaking and stuttering. It said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bennet, honestly, okay, she’s just a normal girl and she’s missing. _Please_.”

I said, “For fuck’s sake, Frady, either tell me the truth or go find another detective. I’m not interested in trying to decode your bullshit.”

The was a long pause. The lights in my office buzzed with their usual fluorescent menace.

Frady said, “Okay, but this has to be in person and I need to see that file you say you have.”

I said, “Fine. There’s a sushi place a few blocks from here. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

“No! No. The culvert. This evening. Say five?”

Jesus, what was this, some adolescent’s version of a high noon standoff? The kid might as well be holding up a neon sign saying, _Trap!_ At least he hadn’t told me to come alone or unarmed.

He said, “And...and come alone.”

I wanted to bounce my skull off my desk. Instead I sighed and said, “Sure.”

The line went dead. I put my phone in my pocket and leaned back in my chair.

It was stupid of me to agree, but now I’d got this far I wanted to see how it would all end. Frady didn’t seem like the type to orchestrate all this, and I was pretty sure his concern about his sister was genuine. Either he was a much better actor than I’d given him credit for, or there was someone else pulling the strings. Someone I wanted to meet.

Someone I hoped was not Tracy Strauss.

\----

Just because Frady wasn’t meeting me there didn’t mean I couldn’t sit myself down at the bar of my local sushi joint and order up an unseemly number of rolls. Crushed elbow to elbow with the other other smelly, sweaty patrons set my teeth on edge, but I didn’t feel like going back home and I desperately needed the food: all I’d had to eat was a bottle of rye and three stale breath mints I’d found under my coffee maker.

Six tuna maki into an order of ten someone grabbed my left shoulder almost exactly where Tracy had left a deep, bloody bite mark. I’d covered the thing with bandages and my diminished hopes that one day I wouldn’t have a pale ridge of jagged teeth marks cut into my skin.

I flinched and the culprit said, “Still a little sore, are you?”

“Hello, Tracy.”

She sat down next to me, though I wasn’t sure how she found the space. Witchcraft, probably.

She smiled a dangerous smile full of threats and violence and said, “Hello, Noah.”

I put another roll into my mouth, reached for some sake and drank it slowly, trying to decide what I wanted to say. After a suitably awkward silence punctuated by my indecorous gulping, I settled on, “What do you want?”

“I want you to prove my innocence so I can get back to my life.”

“So you’ve said.” I placed my chopsticks down and turned to face her. “Stalking doesn’t look good on you, Tracy.”

She said, “Everything looks good on me,” which was hard to argue, and she added, “What makes you think I’m stalking someone?”

I tilted my head. “Not someone, me. You can’t expect me to believe you’d spend any time around here if you weren’t after something.”

“Maybe I wanted a good screw.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be.”

“Okay.”

Another pause and I went back to my chopsticks, this time picking up a piece of gyoza. With my mouth full, I mumbled, “Oowonsom?”

She said, “That’s appalling.”

I swallowed and smirked and said, “I know.”

I said, “Why are you here, Tracy?”

She didn’t answer that, or anything else, so I went back to eating with her watching me. Which made the process of trying to get through my meal palpably uncomfortable. I didn’t like being observed at the best of times and this, well, this was not the best of times, me in a rumpled grey suit, clean but reeking of the booze I’d had earlier. Just like the rest of me: showered, but still unshaven and with alcohol permeating my pores.

When I had nothing left to eat or drink, I turned back to Tracy. She was eyeing my throat like a predator contemplates the jugular of its prey just before it strikes.

I said, “I have somewhere to be,” which was true, but not the reason I’d said it; the silence between us was stretching itself into a gulf and at the bottom I was pretty sure was nothing good.

She put her hand on my arm. Her touch was gentle, which was baffling. I kept expecting to be punched or scratched. I frowned at her. She said, “I’m scared.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I thought about trying something unhelpful and cliche like, You should be, or, So am I, or, So is everyone. Instead I said nothing. I didn’t move my arm away or try to get up, though. I just sat there looking at her. Mostly at her eyes. The thing with Stage Two bots was they had these little flecks in their irises, glowing patterns you could only see when the light hit just right, which wasn’t often. Right now, in the dark restaurant, her eyes looked like human eyes, tired ones rimmed with panic.

She said, “Whoever’s doing this, they’re going to come after me eventually, too. And they’re going to come after you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, either, except to agree that it was probably true. I said, “I might have a lead from the kid who put me on to this case. I’m going to meet him now, see if I can’t shake out who’s behind it.” I didn’t add: and I still haven’t ruled you out. It would have been a lie, anyway. She could be guilty as hell, but anymore I wasn’t really interested in finding out if she was. I wanted her not to be and hoped that my wanting it could make it true, even though I knew from a lifetime of experience that wasn’t how things worked.

I stood up. She let her hand drift away from my arm and she whispered, “Be careful.”

I smiled and ghosted my fingers down her cheek and then I turned and left.

\----

The sun was setting when I got to Frady’s ridiculous meeting place. Obnoxiously bright beams of sunlight were sparkling off a thick grey haze of pollution and the cracked cement glowed faintly in shades of piss yellow and puke orange. I’d come alone, as instructed, with the thin file in one hand and a gun in the other. I had a second gun, the .38 from my office, strapped to my ankle, just in case this went as poorly as I thought it would.

I had a few minutes to stand there in the open, wondering if my life was going to come to a sudden end with a sniper’s bullet in my head; a viciously quick cut to black and my brain matter splattered all over the culvert like a 3D painting. Some new abstract art to rejuvenate the faded graffiti.

That didn’t happen. Or at least it wouldn’t happen until later. A hulking vehicle pulled up and out of it stepped four silhouettes. A short sloping one I recognized from its uneasy gait as Frady, and I had to admit to being impressed he’d shown up in person. The other humanoid shades were a tall, well-built individual, probably male; a small lumpy figure like something bent and broken and covered in rags; and a smooth, serene female form, almost mistakable for Tracy but with a more clinical strut.

The woman with the strut, she walked with a sharp click to her heels and a swagger like she owned everything she saw, even me. When she was close enough that I could make out her face I realized why: Erica Kravid, the head of Renautus. Well, shit. She really did own just about everything.

She said, “Hello, Noah. It’s been a long time,” and her voice was the silky purr of a lioness waiting to strike.

Behind her, the faces of Frady, Harris Prime, and a desolate looking girl came into focus. I frowned and squinted into her pinched, callow face. Her eyes were hollow and the shadows below them were harsh black, stage makeup depression.

I glared at Frady. I ground out, “Your sister doesn’t seem to be too missing afterall.”

Erica said, in an overly-smoothed tone that made the base of my skull ache, “It’s not really his fault.”

I said, “What did you do to her?”

It was a useless question; I knew exactly what they’d done. I’d seen the kind of facility Renautus used to torment augmented people like Phoebe under the auspices of science and better futures and whatever else PR crap they were spewing out this week.

I looked at Frady. Quentin. His head was bowed and his lips were moving in a silent plea or maybe a prayer.

Erica and her expensive black leather pumps click clacked over to where I was standing and said, “I’d like that file, please.”

“I’m sure you would.”

“Phoebe?”

The girl shot tendrils of darkness out of her hands that came shimmering toward me. I was staring down the maw of a black, formless kraken. An ink cthulhu. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that? I tried to shoot at it, but wasn’t surprised when all three of the bullets tore through the shadows without any any effect. I heard them chip into the cement somewhere.

Quentin said, “Phoebe, stop.”

He said, “Phoebe, this isn’t you.”

Almost sobbing he said, “Erica, please, you promised. I did what you asked, now _let her go_.”

Erica laughed. A small snaking line of Phoebe’s black tentacles brushed against my jaw and it felt like how I imagine it was to be ejected into space or flash frozen. In seconds my whole head was frigid, like it had been dunked into a glacial stream; my eyes were watering and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Everything was reduced to searing cold and dots of darkness flashing in my eyes. Just as quickly it was gone, and my face felt like a face again but with part of it missing. I wondered if those nerve endings would ever grow back, or if I would spend the rest of my life as walking freezer burn.

I was on my knees, gasping, gulping down air like I’d be drowning, a sensation I was pretty quickly getting bored of. The knuckles on my right hand were white from curling into the grip of my pistol and the file I’d had in my left was splayed on the grimy cement.

“Pick that up, would you?” Erica said and I didn’t try to stop Phoebe from grabbing it.

Eventually, still spluttering, I rasped, “There’s got to have been an easier way to get that. Why the games? Why not just send one of your people or torch the whole place?”

Erica plucked the file out of Phoebe’s hand and tossed it to Harris. “It wasn’t the file I was after,” she said, her voice bored like she was explaining the alphabet to a toddler.

I staggered to my feet. Harris—two Harrises—grabbed my arms. One for each of their vice-grips. The Harris on my right wrested my gun away and flung it toward Erica. It clattered across the ground noisily. Great. This was going well. I was glad I’d decided to show up.

She said, “Quentin was supposed to be bringing me something far more valuable. Unfortunately for his sister, he failed,” she paused long enough to leer at him, but he his crumpled face, blank and defeated, was fixed on his sister. Or whatever was left of her. “I didn’t want to do it this way, but I suppose we’ll just have to torture it out of you.”

His eyes boring into Erica’s back, Quentin said, “Let her go.”

To Erica I said, “I’m not interested.”

“Cute,” she said. “Now, where is your daughter?”

I didn’t answer. Of course that’s what all this was about. I should have known from the beginning. Maybe part of me did, the way my thoughts kept crawling back to her, worrying over her safety and anonymity. I looked at Phoebe and was immensely grateful I didn’t actually know Claire’s location. They could do whatever they damn well pleased, but I couldn’t give them information I didn’t have.

To me, Quentin said, “I’m sorry. I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”

He said, “All those people dead. They made her. She isn’t like that. She isn’t.”

The hands on my arms tightened painfully and Erica said, “Where is Claire, Noah?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

At a glance from Erica Phoebe’s darkness was back hovering in front of me. I thought, What a piss-poor way to die, frozen from the inside out by some fucked up enhancement. It was embarrassing to think of somebody finding my corpse here. I hoped it would get moved at least.

Quentin was crying now and he said, “Phoebe you have to stop. You havetostophavetostop _havetostop_.”

Erica said, “I’m giving you a chance, Noah, before I have Phoebe dig the answer out of you.”

I snorted. “Good luck with that.”

Phoebe’s black liquid limbs floated closer like shadow puppet spiders filled with ice. I closed my eyes. I could feel the cold radiating against my face.

There was a crack and the freezing air was gone. I opened my eyes and Phoebe was lying dead on the ground with a bullet through her chest and a lake of crimson blood pooling all around her. Her brother was standing over her, pale and shaking and holding onto my gun with both his hands like it was a lifeline. Staring at his sister, tears running down his face into his beard, he said, “I’m sorry, Phoebe. I’m sorry. I wanted to save you. I’m sorry,” and he shot himself in the head.

Chunks of white bone and pink brain flew outward splattering the culvert. The sun hitting all that gore at its low evening angle made it all gleam brightly, made it glow like a fire made of shimmering carnage.

I forced my way free of the Harrises while they stood gazing slack-jawed at the mangled corpses and grabbed my revolver and shot them both and then the third. They disappeared into a hiss of smoke and piles of pale ashes. Clones, all three. I leveled my gun at Erica and then went blind. I was on my back and there were stars popping in and out of my vision and I could feel tears on my face and taste blood in my mouth.

Wavering in front of me was a fourth Harris.

I said, “The fuck?” and he kicked me in the mouth. I was expecting to be hauled into Erica’s vehicle and trundled back to Renautus like a hunting trophy, but instead I heard Harris kick my gun from my hand and stomp away.

Erica said, “I’ll find her eventually, Noah. Her blood is the key to saving us all.”

Thickly, choking on my own blood, I said, “Go to hell, Erica.”

She laughed and said, “Where do you think we are?”

To Harris she said, “Leave the bodies,” and she click clacked away. Her car door slammed closed and I heard them drive away.

I stayed still, lying sprawled on the cement and bleeding until the sky had changed from hazy yellow to smudged brown to darkling purple. I thought about Phoebe Frady, the young girl I’d seen in the picture, not the twisted thing she’d become. I wanted to wonder how that could happen to someone. I wanted to be shocked or outraged or sickened, but I wasn’t. I knew what Erica had done to destroy Phoebe. Not the details, but the broad strokes. The kind of emotional abuse and torture and dehumanizing that was required, I’d seen it all before. I’d been a part of it. And it was why I’d finally turned my back on Primatech and everything else like it—the fear that they would catch Claire and make her a monster, too, when I was monster enough for us both.

So I stayed still until the air cooled ever so slightly and was grateful that even if she didn’t want to have anything to do with me, at least Claire was still Claire. At least she hadn’t had the life gouged and torn and suffocated out of her by Erica Kravid. And that was all I really needed.


	7. Chapter 7

Tracy was sitting on my couch when I finally dragged myself back to my apartment. I squinted at her. It looked like she had one of my shirts on, but that would have been absurd.

She looked up at me and said, “Jesus. What the hell happened to your face?”

I grabbed a bottle of something—I didn’t give a crap what—out of my dwindling liquor cabinet and collapsed next to her and said, “Don’t you have a home of your own?”

She took the bottle out of my hands and set it down on the coffee table. I made a guttural protest in the form of a few pining consonants. She tssked at me and slid my glasses off my face. She said, “I think your nose is broken.”

“Yes.”

“Are you planning to do something about that?”

“I was planning to drink something and maybe complain about it,” I said, snatching back the bottle of it turned out vodka and gulping down a few slurping sips.

Tracy reached across me and pressed her hand to the shattered cartilage on my face and turned her palm to ice. Then she took the vodka back, took a swig, and placed it on the table.

Closing my eyes I slurred, “Spedder thana ice pack.”

She said, “Ugh,” but slid closer to me anyway. 

I considered slinging an arm over her shoulder, but thought better of it. The lock to my door was still broken and Erica would be back sooner rather than later to make good on her threat to find Claire.

Tracy’s hand still on my face, I slouched down into the cushions and leaned my head back and wondered vaguely what retirement might look like, if maybe it would be a little less violent. Somehow that seemed unlikely.

\----

Some events can never be changed.

There are constants and there are variables and there are an infinite number of combinations: many universes, many outcomes. Across all of them, at the seams of every timeline and alteration, there is a delicate intertwining of immutable events, a permanent joinery underpinning the fabric of each reality.

These things can  _ never _ be changed.

But other things, they can be reshaped by time and circumstance. Small ripples in a broader pool gathering themselves into waves that crash against the immovable walls of fate or god or the universe.

This is the way of the cosmos; some things simply  _ are _ .

And other things are not.


End file.
